Hi ! - here is what a former KDE user notices in XFCE on first glance

Its an awesome desktop system! Congratulations...

I am a potential co-developer of XFCE now cause I know how to contribute code and use git and ....

Here is my story:

I am very annoyed with ubuntu/DELL as of recently. My xps 15 (L502X) stopped suspending after I upgraded some packages on my system. A lot of forum/bugtracker searching took me 2 days with no success..

Somewhere in the process my kde 4.8 got to a point where I could not use the Start Menu button any more. All the kde apps crashed and could not be launched...

I searched for the error messages I was getting and it turned out all kinds of people were having them...

This is not the first time I have problems / instabilities after KDE upgrades. So to use my laptop I switched to LXDE at first... Several first sight annoyances made me wanna try XFCE. And now I am happy. Looks good. It is fast. And has all the everyday things I need from a desktop environment... All in all one could say google chrome is my OS/desktop env really these days ..

So things to take away:- kde was not the cause for the suspend problems - it is 95% certain that it has sth to do with a faulty nvidia/dell/intel driver (aka the big hardware vendors dont have the time/desire to help open source ...) and from the other side of it - maybe not enough suport in the 3.2.0 kernel...- KDE was too buggy for me. Maybe I got emotional after the suspend bug made me angry...- XFCE is easy enough and not buggy so far

TRying for a few days if I will get nostalgic about KDE. Currently cant think of a logical reason why...

Stay tuned.

I like what XFCe comes by default with :- the tooltips- the settings are easy to find- the right click menus are minimal and contain only stuff I actually need- the overall visuals - awesome- the lightness- the app launcher program- all the necessary plugins are here- I can very easily change the start menu icon... - the brightness/volume Fn keys work and display a nice OSD while changing... this was screwed in KDE last time. Generally it worked...

I dont like:- when the main panel is put to the left in a vertical mode - the text goes vertical too - kinda funny to have to rotate my head each time to read the win title - there is no search bar in the start menu (but the Application Finder is easy to find - both in the start menu and also easy to setup as a separate widget in the panel...)- I cant make the desktop show a folder of my choosing or no icons at all- the alt+f2 launcher is too simple - am I missing sth ? I use it in conjunction with the app finder - depending on what I want to do- there is no fast everuday calculator in the alt+f2 launcher - I miss the "=5+5" functionality from KDE. Tried running krunner - no luck. Gnome do is prolly what I have to use - but it depends on mono - which is a shame for me... cause mono is Microsoft's backdoor into screwing linux...

- there is no fast everuday calculator in the alt+f2 launcher - I miss the "=5+5" functionality from KDE. Tried running krunner - no luck. Gnome do is prolly what I have to use - but it depends on mono - which is a shame for me... cause mono is Microsoft's backdoor into screwing linux...

Re: Hi ! - here is what a former KDE user notices in XFCE on first glance

Occasionally (although I'm not at all sure it has anything to do with your problem) Dell will have a proprietary version of a common chip (I know they were doing it with some Atheros wifi cards, wherein the Atheros driver didn't work quite right, but the Dell driver would.)

It will, on the odd occasion, make it difficult under Windows to be sure what driver you need, much less Linux.

(We used to have a box of those secondhand wifi cards for repairing systems. Some Dell, others not. They looked identical. I was sooooo glad when the last one was gone, and I could quit playing "guess which driver.")

This is why I tend to avoid Dell in favor of manufacturers who use the stock standard stuff, although I will say I've gotten some really good and stable results installing Linux on some old Dell comps.